Cong could count the farmer on its side

3

Tweet

These are elections that the Congress Party has been preparing for over a year. Last year, then Finance Minister P Chidambaram was surprised when the party's troubleshooter Pranab Mukherjee had said privately, soon after the Budget, that elections would be held on time. Mr Chidambaram had showered Rs 66,000 crore on the countryside in the biggest farm loan waiver ever and in a press conference, after the Budget presentation, he had said, "the time has come to stand up and be counted". The math he was talking about was the arithmetic of votes.

The loan waiver would not have been needed, or its size could have been reduced, if successive governments, including this one, had not meddled with farm pricing. Last year, when food prices shot up worldwide, in response to a spurt in oil prices (and diversion of corn for production of bio-fuel), wheat and non-basmati rice exports were banned, depressing farm incomes. Buffer stocks are expected to touch 50 million tonnes, double the covered-storage capacity of Food Corporation of India, and they might have to be exported at a loss, as the NDA government did, when there are people in this country going hungry!

Though farmers would have earned more if exports of wheat and ordinary rice were not banned, they have little to complain about. The government has raised support prices by 71 per cent for wheat over the past five years. The increase for rice has been in excess of 50 per cent. Cotton procurement prices were raised by 40 per cent (Rs 740 a unit) in just one year. World prices have since collapsed, and the Cotton Corporation of India is sitting on losses.

Average agriculture growth in these five years would be over three per cent, up from 2.4 per cent during the NDA regime. The government is yet to meet its irrigation targets, but there has been a massive increase in bank lending. The distribution of hybrid seeds has also helped. Above all, luck has been on the government's side. During the NDA regime, there were two years of drought.

The National Rural Employment Scheme is said to have raised average rural wages from Rs 60 a day to Rs 83 a day. Despite leakages and severe shortcomings, it is a programme that has helped the rural poor, at least in the better-governed states. There were reports last year of a shortage of farm labour in Punjab because the scheme had checked migration from Bihar.

Luckily for the government, inflation has fallen, though food prices remain high at the retail level. But there is no denying that there is no gloom in rural India, unlike in the cities. But then, cities also gained the most from the global economic boom.

Will the feel-good factor in the countryside help the Congress? In states like Uttar Pradesh, where farmers gained from the spurt in food prices, the party has no machinery to reap votes. How the party fares will depend on the alliances it cobbles. But there is not much reason for a negative rural vote.